MOSQUITOES, QUININE AND THE SOCIALISM OF ITALIAN WOMEN 1900–1914 Malaria qualifies as a major issue of modern Italian history because of the burden of death, suffering and economic cost that it imposed. But it is fruitful to examine its history from a more hopeful, if largely neglected, vantage point. Paradoxically, mal- aria — or rather the great campaign to eradicate it with quinine — played a substantial political role. It promoted the rise of the Italian labour movement, the formation of a socialist aware- ness among farmworkers and the establishment of a collective consciousness among women. In 1900 the Italian parliament declared war on malaria. After a series of vicissitudes, this project achieved final victory in 1962 when the last indigenous cases were reported.1 Italy thus provided the classic example of the purposeful eradication of malaria. The argument here is that the early phase of this campaign down to the First World War played a profoundly subversive role. The campaign served as a catalyst to mass movements by farmworkers, especially women. Three geographical areas were most affected: the rice belt of Novara and Pavia provinces in the North, the Roman Campagna in the Centre, and the province of Foggia in the South. Inevitably, this argument involves the intersection of malaria with two further disasters that befell millions. One was the mis- fortune of being born a farm labourer in a society where serious commentators debated who suffered more — Italian braccianti (farmworkers) in the latter half of the nineteenth century or American slaves in the first.2 The other disaster was the burden of being not only a field hand but also a woman in a nation that Anna Kuliscioff, the most prominent feminist of the period, 1 World Health Organization, Regional Office for Europe, Prevention of the Reintroduction of Malaria in the Countries of the Western Mediterranean: Report on a WHO Meeting, Erice (Italy), 23–27 October 1979 (Geneva, 1979), 5. 2 On this point debate continues. See Raimondo Luraghi, ‘Wage Labor in the “Rice Belt” of Northern Italy and Slave Labor in the American South — A First Approach’, Southern Studies, xvi (1977), 109–27. © The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2003 MOSQUITOES, QUININE AND ITALIAN WOMEN 177 described as second only to Turkey and Spain in Europe for its absence of attention to women’s emancipation. Italy, she wrote in a famous phrase, was the ‘monopoly of men’.3 Here it is useful to bring together three distinguishing features of the Giolittian era (1900–14), Italy’s belle e´poque. First is malaria, which remained in 1900 the leading public health problem although the disease had long disappeared from nearly all the rest of western Europe. Partly for this very reason, Italy became the world centre of malariology. Italian scientists such as Angelo Celli, Camillo Golgi, Giovanni Battista Grassi and Ettore Marchiafava played a preponderant role in unravelling the mech- anisms of the disease and its transmission. Second is the emer- gence of Italian socialism as a mass movement primarily in the countryside. And third is the substantial influence of women in shaping rural socialism itself. But the starting point is malaria. Italians initially became aware of the full impact of malaria in the 1880s. In 1882 the first map of malarial Italy appeared, and in 1887 the first official health statistics. What they revealed was that, although the problem was most acute in the South and in Lazio, the whole peninsula was affected. Only four of Italy’s sixty-nine provinces were fever-free. Furthermore, every year 2,000,000 people were infected or reinfected, and 20,000 to 100,000 died.4 In the most afflicted zones virtually everyone was malarious, often from birth, since malaria can be transmitted from mother to foetus. There life expectancy was severely fore- shortened; and malaria, which — like AIDS — destroys the immune system, was the indirect cause of most deaths from disease. This terrible parasitic infection predisposed sufferers to the secondary infections that were the chief killers of the Italian countryside — the respiratory diseases of pneumonia, bronchitis and influenza among adults, and gastrointestinal infections among infants and small children. The heaviest burden of all, however, was chronic malarial fever, which debilitated millions. Classic stigmata of endemic malaria are anaemia, jaundice, painful enlargement of the spleen, 3 Anna Kuliscioff, Il Monopolio dell’uomo (Palermo, 1979). For the placing of Italy behind only Turkey and Spain, see p. 10. A popular article detailing the long delay in the establishment of feminism in Italy is ‘La Questione femminista in Italia’, Minerva, xvi (July–Dec. 1898), 79–81. 4 Giovanni Battista Grassi, the foremost Italian malariologist, argued that a more accurate figure for annual deaths from malaria at that time would be 100,000: Difesa contro la malaria nelle zone risicole (Milan, 1905), 5. 178 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 178 underdeveloped musculature and irreversible neurological dam- age leading ultimately to cachexia or total apathy. Moreover, as the Nobel laureate Ronald Ross reminds us, malaria and economic development are mutually exclusive. ‘Very malarious places’, he wrote, ‘cannot be prosperous. For the state as for the individual the first postulate of prosperity is health’.5 The medical officer of health for the province of Girgenti provided a cogent assessment. ‘The problem of malaria’, he wrote in 1908, is certainly immense . and complicated. The enormous prevalence of the disease has the most serious social consequences because the infec- tion — tenacious and lasting — undermines the body. Malaria causes physical decline . it prevents growth and alters the very structure of the population. Fever destroys the capacity to work, annihilates energy and renders a people sluggish and indifferent. Inevitably, therefore, mal- aria stunts productivity, wealth and well-being; it shackles the develop- ment of industry and agriculture; and it casts a pall over the whole society. The misery arising from this malady produces ignorance, a low standard of culture and morality and ineradicable illiteracy.6 I RICE FIELDS Of all infectious diseases, malaria is the most sensitive to the relationship of human beings to their environment. It requires warmth and stagnant water at low altitude where anopheline mosquitoes — the vectors of the disease — can breed. It also presupposes an abundant supply of humans living and working in close proximity, because mosquitoes are weak fliers that travel no more than a few miles from their birthplace. The danger rises exponentially if people perform outdoor labour in the summer, especially at dawn and dusk, when mosquitoes are most active. The rate of transmission increases still more if the victims sleep in crowded quarters, if an impoverished diet compromises their resistance, and if inadequate clothing exposes their bodies to biting insects. Certain agrarian institutions were notorious for promoting these optimal conditions for fever. In northern Italy the rice fields or risaie of the Po valley generated the greatest obloquy. Italy 5 Ronald Ross, The Prevention of Malaria (London, 1910), pp. vii–viii. 6 Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione Generale della Sanita` (hereafter ACS, MI, DGS) (1882–1915), b. 115, Prefetto di Girgenti, ‘Relazione sulla campagna antimalarica’. MOSQUITOES, QUININE AND ITALIAN WOMEN 179 TABLE 1 RICE PRODUCTION IN ITALY BY REGION, 1901 (hectolitres)* Piedmont 2,200,000 Lombardy 3,220,000 Veneto 755,000 Emilia 584,000 Tuscany 8,000 Sicily 32,000 Mainland South 600 Total 6,799,600 * Source: Oreste Bordiga, ‘La Produzione ed il commercio del riso’, Atti del 2o Congresso Risicolo Internazionale: Mortara, 1–3 ottobre 1903 (Mortara-Vigevano, 1904), 50. was the major rice grower of Europe. Production was concen- trated in Piedmont and Lombardy, although there was also signi- ficant cultivation in the Veneto and Emilia-Romagna. In 1901 Italian production, expressed in hectolitres, was regionally distributed as shown in Table 1.7 This crop inspired numerous regulations, official inquiries and an abolitionist literature advocating a ban on its cultivation. Medical observers concluded that risaie played a prominent role in the aetiology of malaria. The physician Pietro Canalis is typical. Commissioned to investigate the health of rice workers, Canalis noted in 1905 that ‘There is no need to demonstrate that malaria is the principal cause of ill health in rice production because the experience of centuries has settled the issue’.8 Giovanni Giolitti, the prime minister, believed that the link between the grain and fever was incontrovertible. Rice production, he declared, ‘is first in line among the agricultural occupations that demand the inter- vention of the law’.9 Further, in the heart of the rice belt, the city council of Vercelli admitted in 1903 that: ‘To deny the 7 Arranged in rank order, the leading provinces for rice production in Italy at the turn of the century were: Pavia, Novara, Milan, Verona, Mantua, Bologna, Rovigo, Reggio Emilia and Ravenna. ACS, MI, DGS (1882–1915), b. 748, fasc. Legge sulla risicoltura, ‘La Coltura del riso e le diverse operazioni agricole’, 14–15. On the history of rice production in Italy, see Luigi Faccini, ‘Lavoratori della risaia fra ’700 e ’800: Condizioni di vita, alimentazione, malattie’, Studi storici, xiv/3 (1974), 545–88. 8 ACS, MI, DGS (1882–1915), b. 747, ‘Relazione del prof. Canalis: Risaie’, 1. 9 Ibid., b. 747, fasc. Risicoltura: Atti parlamentari, ‘Disegno di legge presentato dal presidente del consiglio, ministro dell’interno (Giolitti): Sulla risicoltura’. Atti parla- mentari, Camera dei deputati, sess. 1904–1907, documenti, n. 651, seduta del 21 febbraio 1907, p. 1. Although his own view of the effect of rice production on health was less critical than the prevailing opinion, Camillo Golgi carefully considered the dominant conviction: Le Condizioni fisiche dei contadini nelle zone risicole (Milan, 1907). 180 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 178 existence of malaria in this district is to deny the light of day.